German developer Cultured Code today released Things 3 .4 for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, bringing several new productivity features to the popular to-do app, including an expansive new URL scheme for linking, powerful automation and handover from other apps.

Linking to Things

Made possible by Culture Code’s brand new URLs that start with “things:”, these links can reference a to-do or list in Things and can be used to jump to a particular point in Things from other apps. To generate a link on your Mac, right-click any item and choose Share → Copy Link.

As an example, tapping the link things:///show?id=today will open Things on your device and tell it to show your Today list (works only if you already have Things 3.4 installed).

With custom URLs, you can easily paste your project’s link into another app and quickly jump back to it in Things when need be. Of course, you can also link related to-dos and lists inside of Things itself.

Automation

Powerful time-saving automations are now available in Things 3.4.

Again, taking advantage of the app’s new URL scheme, the “things:” links can be used to execute a bunch of complex commands from outside of the app, allowing you to create to-dos, show tag filters, perform searches and so on. These automations work great with apps like Launcher, Launch Center Pro and Apple’s own Workflow.

Here are a few examples (if you’ve updated to 3.4, tap to execute them):

Handover from other apps

Not to be confused with Apple’s Handoff continuity feature, this capability allows other apps that took advantage of Culture Code’s open source Swift library to send data into Things. This basically makes it easy to create entire Things projects from other apps, complete with notes, headings and to-dos.

As an example, the mind mapping app MindNode lets you brainstorm your ideas and then export them as a Things project when the time is right. “We’re happy that the Drafts app has also built this feature into their upcoming version, and hope to see more apps with integration soon,” the developers said.

This release of Things for iOS and macOS also brings diacritic-insensitive search so no longer do you have to be very particular with your queries. For instance, searching for “uber” will also find “über”, searching for “francais” will also find “français” and so forth.